Primitive culture, in the lexicon of early anthropologists, any of numerous societies characterized by features that may include lack of a written language, relative isolation, small population, relatively simple social institutions and technology, and a generally slow rate of sociocultural change. In some of these cultures history and beliefs are passed on through an oral tradition and may be the province of a person or group especially trained for the purpose.

So great are the variations in ways of life, past and present, that comparisons among them are difficult. Any simple classification of human societies and cultures can only be viewed as arbitrary. From a modern urban point of view, nevertheless, there is the obvious distinction between the primitive and the civilized: between simple and complex societies; between tiny and huge social agglomerations; between scattered and dense populations; and, above all, between prestate societies and societies that have developed states. In general, civilization involves the rise of legal institutions and the acquisition of a legal monopoly of force by a government. Those developments made possible the cities and empires of classical times and the growth of dense populations. Thus “civilized” is nearly synonymous with “urban.”

The varieties of nonurban, or primitive, societies may be further classified. One way is by the methods they use to get food. Those who hunt and gather behave quite differently, as societies, from herdsmen and mounted predator-warriors, the pastoralists, who in turn live quite differently from the various kinds of agriculturalists. These distinctions are not sharp, for of course there are societies that combine foraging with some agriculture, others, some agriculture and some herding; and, in a few cases, a class of herders may live in the same society with a class or caste of agriculturalists. A continuum of societies may be constructed, ranging from tiny, simple bands of hunter-gatherers in poor environments to large, dense populations of irrigation agriculturalists—that is, from the entirely nomadic to the fully sedentary. The degree to which societies approach the sedentary deserves prominence in any classification since sedentary ways are accompanied by many other cultural traits and institutions.

Nomadic societies

Throughout 99 percent of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth, or until about 8,000 years ago, all peoples were foragers of wild food. There were great differences among them; some specialized in hunting big game, fishing, and shellfish gathering, while others were almost completely dependent on the gathering of wild plants. Broadly speaking, however, they probably shared many features of social and political organization, as well as of religions and other ideologies (in form though not in specific content). The hunting-gathering societies declined with the growth of agricultural societies, which either drove them from their territories or assimilated or converted them.

The later rise of the nation-states, especially after the Industrial Revolution in Europe, resulted in the near extermination of hunting-gathering societies. Today, the remaining ones are confined to desert, mountain, jungle, or Arctic wastelands. Some have been studied and described by anthropologists: the central and northern Australians, the Bushmen of the Kalahari in southern Africa, the Pygmies of the central African forests, the Pygmies of the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Ona and Yahgan Indians of southern South America, the “Digger” Indians of Nevada, the Indians of the northern Canadian forests, and the Canadian, Alaskan, and Greenland Eskimos.

All of these peoples inhabit areas representing almost every extreme in climate and environment, but they have one thing in common: their marginality to, or relative isolation from, modern economic systems. Their techniques and forms of acquiring food vary greatly. The Eskimos, for example, are entirely dependent on hunting and fishing; the African San (Bushmen), the Australian Aborigines, and the Nevada Indians are chiefly dependent on the gathering of seeds, nuts, and tubers.

The significance of nomadism to the student of primitive cultures may be suggested by a comparison of the Ona and Yámana (Yahgan) of Tierra del Fuego. The Ona inhabit the interior forests and depend heavily on hunting guanaco (a small New World camel). The Yámana are canoe-using fishermen and shellfish gatherers. Yet, despite their utterly different ecological adaptation, the two Indian societies have cultures that are so similar that anthropologists conventionally group them with the neighbouring Chono and Alakaluf of Chile into one “Fuegian culture area.” They are all nomadic, though the Ona are “foot Indians” and the others are “canoe Indians”; they are all relatively sparsely scattered over the landscape and poor in material culture, and they have similar social, political, ceremonial, and ideological customs and institutions.

All of the nomads so far mentioned share important general characteristics. The first and most obvious is that their nomadism severely restricts the amount of their “baggage,” or material culture. Bows and arrows (except in Australia, where the unique boomerang is used instead) and perhaps a simple spear javelin, or in some areas throwing sticks or clubs, are the usual hunting and fighting weapons. In warmer zones shelter is a simple lean-to or small beehive hut of sticks, twigs, and leaves. In Arctic zones there are the caribou-skin tent and the famous Eskimo igloo—or, in more permanent or revisited places, the stone hut.

Camps are small and impermanent. The nuclear family likes to camp near related families when possible. Usually this group forms the patrilineallyextended family consisting of brothers with their own nuclear families and perhaps a few dependent elders. But the size of the camp depends on the season: in times of easily gathered plant food, large groups may come together for ceremonies such as puberty rites. At other times, the constituent families may scatter widely because food and water are scarce. Patrilineally related men and their families, scattered or not, commonly regard themselves as a group with rights over a particular territory and may be distinguished from neighbours on a territorial basis as well. Marriages are often arranged among territorial groups so that contiguous groups tend to be related, or at least certain members of different groups are related. But this is the only organizing principle that extends beyond the territorial band. Each band may be thought of as part of a larger society composed of distant as well as close relatives—a “tribe” in one of the original meanings of the word.

The social organization looks as though it had been built up from within, so to speak. Family-like statuses and roles, alliances by marriage, and systems of “social distance” based on family relationships are the bones and connective tissues of the society. These are all ingredients of the family itself, however extended or metaphorically construed; it is as though these societies were simply the result of the growth of individual families. But this is only appearance; such societies also grow by accretion. But inasmuch as alliances and the compounding of different groups normally are brought about by arranged marriages, the familistic appearance of the whole is therefore maintained.

Almost all status positions rest upon the same criteria of age, sex, and kinship distance. The only achieved status is that of the magical curer, the shaman. Again, with the exception of the shaman, the only division of labour in these societies is on the basis of age and sex—just as in the individual nuclear family unit. Among adults, the hunting of big game is confined to men, whereas the gathering of vegetable foods or small animals, birds’ eggs, and so on are women’s tasks. This division of labour seems obviously related to men’s relative ability to range far from camp, women being too burdened with the tasks of motherhood to track animals wherever they may lead. But the separation of tasks is usually more rigid and confining than the physical and circumstantial differences between men and women dictate, since these would vary among individuals and from society to society—and for that matter, from day to day. Domestic tasks are strictly defined as female and are undertaken only by women even when they seem exceptionally taxing, as attest the following remarks by Lewis Garrard, who traveled with a Cheyenne Indian camp in 1846:

After a ride of two hours, we stopped, and the chiefs, fastening their horses, collected in circles, to smoke the pipe and talk, letting their squaws unpack the animals, pitch the lodges, build fires, arrange the robes, and when all was ready, these “lords of creation” dispersed to their several homes, to wait until their patient and enduring spouses prepared some food. I was provoked, nay, angry, to see the lazy, overgrown men, do nothing to help their wives; and, when the young women pulled off their bracelets and finery, to chop wood, the cup of my wrath was full to overflowing, and, in a fit of honest indignation, I pronounced them ungallant, and indeed savage in the true sense of the word.

(Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail; University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Okla., 1966)

Status within the family is based on age, sex, relationships by blood, or marriageability. Males are regarded as superior to women in most activities; the elders are respected as repositories of both secular and spiritual wisdom; and people, such as cousins who may be of the same genealogical distance, are frequently divided into “marriageable” and “nonmarriageable” groups, with consequent differences in their interpersonal behaviour. But in all other respects hunting-gathering societies are profoundly egalitarian, especially in intergroup relations.

Outside the family there is no system of coercive authority. Some persons may, by their wisdom, physical ability, and so on, rise to positions of leadership in some particular endeavour, such as a raiding party or a hunt. But these are temporary and variable positions, not posts or offices within a hierarchical structure. Social order is maintained by emphasizing correctness in conduct—etiquette—and ritual and ceremony. Ceremonies bring together the scattered members of the society to celebrate birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Such ceremonies have the effect of minimizing social dangers (or the perception of them) and also of adjusting persons to each other under controlled emotional conditions. (It may very well be true that “the family that prays together, stays together.”)

The passage rites at birth, marriage, and death are universal in human society, though puberty celebrations are less common in the modern world, except for such survivals as the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. In most hunting-gathering societies, however, male puberty rituals take up more social time and engage more people than do the other three ritual occasions. They may last as long as a month, food supplies permitting. Almost universally, puberty rites include a period of instruction in adult responsibilities, rituals dramatizing the removal of boys from the mothers’ care and signalizing the changed social relations between boys and girls of the same generation, and physical ordeals, including scarification or some other mark that will permanently demonstrate the successful passage to manhood.

The Plains Indians

The mounted buffalo hunters of the North American Great Plains, common in popular literature and cowboy movies, constituted a type of nomadic hunting society. But they represented a brief and very special development: an interaction and amalgamation of elements of Indian culture with Spanish horses and the training of them, as well as with metal and guns. The Indians, once mounted, could follow, surround, and kill tremendous numbers of buffalo, where previously the Indians had found the buffalo herds nearly impregnable. So productive was mounted buffalo hunting that tribes of diverse languages and customs were quickly drawn into the Great Plains from all directions. A distinctive, picturesque culture arose among them, reaching its peak about 1800. But from 1850 through the 1870s the tide of white settlers virtually wiped out the buffalo. By that time most of the Indians had been defeated in battle and confined to reservations.

Equestrian Indians can be regarded as a special form of nomadic hunters rather than as a form of pastoralists. Pastoral culture is dominated by the requirements of domesticated livestock and by the relation of herds to pasture. The Plains Indians’ nomadism, however, was determined by the habits of the wild buffalo herds. The natural cycle of the buffalo was to concentrate in huge herds in summer and disperse into smaller groups in winter and spring. The Indians accordingly traveled in small camps of a few related families in winter and formed huge encampments in summer and fall for tribal ceremonies and organized cooperative hunts. The summer camps sometimes numbered several thousand people.

The continual intrusion of new groups into the Plains—first Indians, then whites—and the introduction of new weapons constantly altered the balance of power and kept the region in a state of belligerent turmoil. Equestrian bow-and-arrow Indians were superior militarily to those on foot; Indians with guns, of course, were superior to bow-and-arrow Indians; but Indians with both guns and horses—as happened in the Central Plains first—were vastly superior to the others. But the supply of horses and guns and especially ammunition continued to fluctuate wildly as access to sources varied greatly from place to place and time to time.

Nomadism places limitations on property and material technology, and the Plains Indians consequently manufactured no pottery, cloth, or basketry, although leatherwork and beadwork were highly developed. On the other hand, being equestrian, they could carry far more goods than nomadic hunters on foot. Perhaps the most notable thing they carried was the large conical tent (tepee) of decorated buffalo hide.

Sociopolitical organization was informal, probably because of the fluidity of the population. On the other hand, some tribal cohesion and systems of alliance were required because of the constant raiding. Consequently, a large number of pan-tribal associations arose, especially military societies and male age-graded societies.

Religion among the Plains Indians reflected the varying sources of the original religions of the pre-horse tribes. Some elements, however, became widespread in the Plains. The folk hero of a great many myths was the trickster Old Man Coyote. There was a widespread concept of Manitou, the pervasive spirit. Most notable was the nearly universal importance attached to the Sun—but without the notion of the Sun as a supreme deity. Ordeals and self-torture and mass ritual self-torture were common Plains religious practices. The Indian tortured himself and fasted in order to suffer hallucinations that would reveal a personal guardian spirit for his protection in the hunt and in battle.

As in other nomadic hunting-gathering societies, principal ceremonies were related to the life cycle, with special prominence given to male puberty rites to instill bravery, endurance, and hunting and raiding skills.

Settled hunting and gathering societies

Outstanding examples of the settled hunters and gatherers were the peoples of the North Pacific Coast of North America, roughly from Oregon to southern Alaska. The resources of the sea and inlets and rivers were of astonishing variety, and some, like the salmon during their runs, were so easy to catch that the word “harvesting” seems more appropriate than “fishing” for this activity. In central and northern California there were numerous sedentary Indian groups, such as the Pomo, Wintun, and Yurok. Their basic food was the acorn, which was ground and stored as flour. Many of the streams had salmon, and the Indians also gathered roots and berries and hunted wild fowl and deer. Other sedentary hunter-gatherer societies are rare and scattered. The most prominent of these are in southwestern New Guinea, as represented by the Asmat. These groups rely on the sago palm, whose starchy pith is easily reduced to flour. Fish, wild birds, and semidomesticated pigs supplement the basic sago.

The basic foods of these sedentary peoples had two common characteristics: they were reliable and they could be stored, much as can the products of agriculture. Salmon were smoke-dried and stored in wooden boxes by the Northwest Coast Indians, and acorn flour obviously could be stored just as can grain flour. Sago flour can also be stored, but it has no season; a palm can be cut at any time the food is required. So abundant and reliable are these resources that such peoples are said to practice a “natural agriculture.”

Sedentary life makes possible many improvements in material culture. Houses become larger and more elaborate and are improved over time. The Asmat of New Guinea and the Northwest Coast Indians make huge houses of planks and are among the best wood-carvers of the primitive world.

Permanent villages and a consistent abundance of food make possible high population densities. The California tribes are estimated to have reached 11 or 12 persons per square mile, as did those of the Northwest Coast. The Asmat of New Guinea have villages ranging up to 2,000 people, which is from 10 to 20 times the size of the average hunting-gathering settlement. Usually such large villages remain politically independent. Intermarriages occur, of course, and some local cohesion is achieved by secret societies and other clublike associations. But such integration is only incidental.

The Northwest Coast Indians elaborated a hierarchical form of organization, or chiefdom. They were the only hunter-gatherers to have done so. Chiefs or nobles occupied positions of high status that were inherited in a single descent line by primogeniture. Secondary lines of descent, collateral to the above, were of lesser status. Finally, there were the commoners.

Along with chiefly status went the socioeconomic institution of redistribution. Surplus products of family production were passed on to the chief, who in turn gave a large feast (or “potlatch”), during which he distributed gifts to those who needed them. This process of redistribution had the economic function of encouraging specialization and division of labour. The potlatch in late times on the Northwest Coast became famous for its competitiveness. A chief of a lineage or longhouse, for example, would amass as much food and material goods as he could in order to lay on a feast and give presents lavishly in hopes that the guest lineage would be unable to reciprocate on the same scale. One lineage, house, or perhaps village thus might “defeat” the others.

The Northwest Coast Indian type of chiefdom is primarily social and economic. It can be called political only to the extent that a certain amount of personal authority for decision making may reside in a high social status. This authority can serve a purpose, however. The egalitarian nature of hunting-gathering bands tends toward anarchy, which becomes perilous in populous societies. Quarrels can turn into feuds for lack of a higher authority to settle them.

Horticultural societies

Primitive agriculture is called horticulture by anthropologists rather than farming because it is carried on like simple gardening, supplementary to hunting and gathering. It differs from farming also in its relatively more primitive technology. It is typically practiced in forests, where the loose soil is easily broken up with a simple stick, rather than on grassy plains with heavy sod. Nor do horticulturalists use fertilizer intensively or crop rotation, terracing, or irrigation. Horticulture is therefore much less productive than agriculture. The villages are small—some no larger than many hunting-gathering settlements—and the overall population density is low compared with farming regions.

Forest horticulturists use fallowing techniques variously called “slash-and-burn,” “shifting cultivation,” and “swidden cultivation” (a northern English term now widely used by anthropologists). After about two years of cropping a plot is left fallow for some years and allowed to revert to secondary forest or bush. Before resuming cultivation the bush may be cut, left to dry, and then burned. The ashes bestow some fertilization, but the foremost benefit of this procedure is that the plot will be relatively weed free at first.

Since the fallowing periods of the plots are much longer than the planted periods, the swidden horticulturalists must gradually encroach on more distant land. Sometimes this results in semisedentary villages when the newly arable plots finally are so distant that a few horticulturalists must start to build huts near the newer fields, to be joined later by others. Such a land-hungry system, in a region of competing populations, greatly increases the chances of conflict. Population dispersal thus becomes a grave threat in horticultural regions. Land for expansion inevitably must be found at the expense of neighbours or by shortening the fallowing periods—which eventually results in lower production.

Many forest tribes—typical are the horticulturalists of the South American tropical forest—constantly maintain a military posture. Large-scale warfare is not usual (because of the lack of political leadership) but raids, cannibalism, torturing of captives, and other forms of belligerence are.

Horticulturalists have more material goods than most hunter-gatherers, though not more than such societies as the Indians of the Northwest Coast. This suggests that the accumulation of domestic goods is related not so much to the higher productivity of the horticulturalists as to their greater stability of settlement.

The most highly developed of aboriginal slash-and-burn horticulturalists were undoubtedly the Maya of Guatemala and Yucatán, who had a chiefdom or primitive state. But this was most exceptional, for almost all other primitive horticulturalists did not go beyond simple tribes with egalitarian and nearly autonomouscommunities. Any regional confederation was likely to be only on the basis of intermarriage and clanship. Sometimes an ephemeral sort of near-chiefdom arises, founded on the capabilities of a charismatic leader. In Melanesia, where a well-established form of personal politics thrives, the leader is called Big Man or Centre Man.

The Big Man in Melanesia is big because he has a following. He begins with his own family and near relatives and friends, who provide goods that he, on behalf of his group, gives away to other groups at a feast on some ceremonial occasion. He and his faction are feasted reciprocally by others at other times. His ability to redistribute on an increasingly lavish scale to larger groups expands his following. He thus amasses what the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, in reporting on the Trobriand Islanders, called a “fund of power.” With the public esteem gained in this economic contest, the Big Man is sought out for giving advice, adjudicating quarrels, planning ceremonies, and admonishing and conciliating. But this is influence, not the true authority that inheres in a status or office in an established hierarchy. A really big Big Man may succeed in integrating a region of several villages, but when he loses to a rival or dies, the unity of the region dissolves until some other unusually influential man unites it again.

In many respects the religion of horticultural peoples resembles that of hunting-gathering peoples. Shamans, life-crisis ceremonies—especially puberty rites—totemism (ceremonies for plant or animal species believed to be ancestral to particular human groups like clans or lineages), and the worship of animistic spirits are common in the religion of many kinds of primitive societies. The egalitarian society does not usually practice ancestor worship as does the hierarchical society. Among horticultural peoples with chiefdoms, the chief’s ancestors, in time, become gods. The most remote ancestors, the founders of the chiefly lineage, are the most important gods; more recent ancestors and those of related but collateral lines have a lesser status. The result is a hierarchy of gods resembling the political hierarchy on Earth. Furthermore, the chiefdoms tend to be theocracies, with the hierarchy of priests closely and functionally related to the political hierarchy.